Brass Man

24

The virtuality Mika had created was an aseptic milky plateau bounded by a cliff, beyond which was a contracted view of the system they now occupied. Seemingly only a few kilometres out from the cliff edge hovered Dragon. She reached up and took hold of an apple-sized model of that entity, and moved it closer to herself. The full-sized version then drew in with alarming realism until it was only a few hundred metres from the plateau’s edge. She turned the model, thus bringing into view on the other version a great trench burned into its flesh, then pulled it right up to the edge of the cliff. A writhing mass of pseudopods inside the trench was drawing layers of flesh across. For a moment she listened in on the opaque conversation between Jerusalem and the entity.

‘Where are you going?’ Jerusalem asked.

‘I return.’

‘To the planet?’

‘Not by choice.’

‘By choices made at Samarkand and Masada.’

‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’

‘Part of yourself.’

‘Separate.’

‘To employ Occam’s razor?’

‘Funny Polity AI.’

As the conversation continued, Mika tuned it out. The words she heard were only the surface of an exchange, a communication that went very much deeper. Perhaps only D’nissan with his recent augmentations might be the one to plumb it entirely.

‘How was it damaged?’ she asked.

‘Tracking directly back along its course.’ Jerusalem’s iconic head appeared beside her—the AI had never disguised the fact that it was capable of conducting a thousand conversations all at once—‘I have detected the debris of an attack ship, though I am yet to determine which one. Also there is a USER singularity eating out the centre of a giant planet nearby. Dragon has just informed me that it destroyed both the USER and the ship guarding it… Ah, the ship was the Excalibur. Other debris in the system would appear to be the remains of the Grim Reaper.’

‘What about the Jack Ketch?’

‘I will inform you when I know more.’

Mika stared at Dragon for a while longer, then turned away. Returning to her immediate research, she eyed the molecule floating before her like an asteroid composed of snooker balls. This was her third. Thus far, the research staff on the Jerusalem had studied over ten thousand such structures to learn their function. Another year working at the same rate and they might even pass one per cent of the total. But Mika knew the rate was bound to change. D’nissan, working with some shipboard AIs and Jerusalem itself, was now decoding the programming languages of the Jain, and already new methods, new approaches were being found. It reminded Mika of the well-documented human genome project back in the twentieth century. Back then, the scientists had predicted the project would take decades but, new computer technologies becoming available, those same scientists had very quickly mapped the structure of human DNA. On the Jerusalem, though, they had the advantage that their work was synergetic: the more they learnt about Jain technology, the more tools it provided them to learn with.

This particular molecule, like those she had already studied, was an engine of multiple function. It self-propagated like a virus, but did not necessarily destroy the cells it invaded. It was small enough to need to suborn little of the cellular machinery for reproduction, and its offspring caused little damage leaving the reproductive cell. However, outside the cell, its function multiplied. It could destroy other cells, cause accelerated division in other cells and make nerve cells signal repeatedly. The molecule was also programmable: its function could be changed once it plugged into other unidentified molecules. Mika realized it was thus just one mote of that part of the technology Skellor used to subjugate human beings.

An hour later, the Jerusalem abruptly dropped into U-space.

‘It seems the party has moved on,’ Jerusalem said.

Mika did not suppose the AI meant the drinks and canapés kind.

They had surfaced from U-space, but for Cormac his perception of the real seemed permanently wrecked—a rip straight through it. Every solid echoed into grey void, and the stale air of the ship seemed to be pouring into that rather than towards some large breach nearby. Gazing at his thin-gun, Cormac saw it was both an object and a grey tube punching into infinity, which, he reflected with an almost hysterical amusement, was precisely what it had been to those he had killed with it. When he entered the bridge, Cento was a perilous moving form casting laser shadows behind it, and when the Golem fired his APW, the fire burned with negative colour.

The blast threw Skellor past Cormac, slamming him up against the quartz screen of the ship like a black iron statue. The screen disintegrated and Skellor disappeared. For a moment Cormac thought the bio-physicist had been blown clear of the ship, but there had been insufficient air left to do that, and anyway Cormac’s torn vision of reality showed him flat laser shadows now clinging to the outside hull, above the screen.

‘Foolish. Trying to kill me, he freed me,’ came over the link Cormac had with the biophysicist, then, after a pause, followed a howl of rage. Cormac pushed down the link, tried to see what Skellor was seeing, could not fathom the vast curving horizon.

‘Why is he so angry?’ he mouthed to Cento, as the Golem came before him.

Cento replied through the comunit of Cormac’s environment suit: ‘Because he is going to die, and there’s no way he can avoid it. It’s as inevitable as gravity.’

Cormac understood now. He saw all the curves, saw the mountain, the eversion the brown dwarf star created in U-space.

‘We are all going to die?’ he suggested.

Just then, something half-seen shot in through the front screen, arrowed through the bridge, and slammed into Cento. The APW flew from the Golem’s hand, bounced from a wall and, turning slowly end over end, headed slowly towards outer space. Skellor, a blackened atomy whorled and distorted around nodular growths in his body, now tore at the Golem.

Cormac could do nothing to help Cento although he fought against the enclosing structure. When he felt the wash of tidal forces through his body, he knew that in very little time that same wash would intensify sufficiently to shatter the Jain structure, but by then the tidal forces would have compressed and stretched his body to a sludge of splintered bone and ruptured flesh inside it. It occurred to him, with crazy logic, that such damage to himself was required as payment for the pain he had already suffered. On another level it occurred to him that he was not entirely rational at that moment.

Skellor, he saw, was not attempting to subvert Cento as he had with Gant. Perhaps he had lost the ability. More likely he had lost the inclination. Extinction looming as close as that vast brown horizon, the man wanted vengeance, wanted the satisfaction of smashing something. But, in the end, none of it mattered. Cormac ceased to struggle. The brown dwarf possessed its own huge inevitability. Then, as the hole where the front screen had been veered away from the dwarf, he spotted another ship through the opening, dark against the further stars, and two lines curving down from it like hooks. The Ogygian jerked once, twice, then suddenly Cormac was heavy inside the Jain structure—being crammed over to one side.

Grappling claws.

Loose objects inside the bridge dropped to the floor, then slid hard sideways. Cormac tracked the APW, caught in the rim of the screen hole, his thin-gun down on the floor by the nearby console—useless to him. Through the screen gap he observed the colonist sphere located at the further end of the craft swing round and down towards the vast brown plain. Then came a vibration through the ship, as of a giant electric saw operating. Blinding incandescence flooded in: a small percentage of lased light refracting from metal vapour. Most of the front end of the vessel was now falling away, severed by a powerful laser.

Cento and Skellor slammed into the wall. The Golem was down to metal, and Skellor had even torn some of that away. Long pink lesions cut into Skellor’s blackened carapace, golden nodules showed in these like some strange scar tissue.

Cormac suddenly felt Skellor’s glee, and picked up the subsequent exchange: Thank you, my liege, Skellor uttered sarcastically over the ether.

You will undoubtedly thank me, came the reply.

Cormac wondered at this madness. It was a foolish move on the part of the AI attack ship to rescue himself and Cento at the risk of allowing Skellor also to go free. His thought encountered amusement. He saw Skellor push Cento to arm’s length, then spin him around and slam him hard into the wall. He recognized that the Golem was now failing.

Skellor whispered to him: ‘The King of Hearts doesn’t work for the Polity any more.’

It was too much: to choose a moral death, then to accept an inevitable one, and then to have both taken away. If only he could strike even the smallest blow. But he could do nothing—was ineffectual. Then, in that moment of extremity, Cormac saw the way. Wasn’t it laughably obvious? Aboard the Jack Ketch Thorn had not hallucinated—had actually seen Cormac move in that way. And Horace Blegg had been correct as well: ‘… your mind will soon find other parts that were never of itself

Staring into the tear in his perception he saw, only for a moment, U-space entire and, like an AI, comprehended it. Enclosed and trapped in Jain substructure, he turned aside and stepped to where he wanted to be, detouring through that other place that made nothing of material barriers. Three metres to the side of the cage of alien carapace, he stepped into the real, reached down beside a console and picked up his thin-gun. Only then did Skellor begin to react, but not fast enough.

Cormac brought the gun up, his arm straight, and fired five times. One shot punched a hole through Skellor’s forehead, the next four hit him in the face, snapping his head back each time and forcing him against the wall. Skellor flickered, but his chameleon-ware would not function and, as Cormac realized, with his own perception so changed it would not matter if it did—Cormac would still see the hole in existence the man occupied. He fired two more shots into the man’s chest, targeted his knees as he tried to spring, blew apart a hand that reached back to press against the wall.

Beside Skellor, Cento unpeeled himself from metal, scissored his legs around the biophysicist’s waist and clamped them there. The Golem then tore away wall panels to reveal an I-beam, which he embraced.

‘The cables,’ Cento said calmly over com.

Cormac loaded another clip and, backing towards where Cento had blown out the screen, continued to pump shots into Skellor. He had to move fast: the Golem would not hold Skellor for long. The clip now empty, Cormac slapped the weapon down against a stick patch at his belt and dived through the missing screen, snagging up the APW as he went. Outside, he glanced down past the truncated ship to where the rest of it continued to fall towards the dwarf star, accompanied in its descent by the ripped-away engine pier and nacelle. Both these objects he could see were distorting, rippling. He found steps, hauled himself up along the curving hull and saw one grapple clenched hard on wreckage where the pier had torn away, the other closed on the next nacelle.

The cables were woven monofilament, hugely strong, but few materials could withstand a concentrated proton blast. High above he saw the attack ship: blades of fusion engine flame cutting down from it to his left. He needed to hit both cables quickly, before that ship fried him. Hopefully that would be enough, because if King of Hearts was like the Jack Ketch, the two grapples—one from each of its weapons nacelles—were all it would have ready. And by the time it readied some more, what remained of the Ogygian would be beyond its reach.

Cormac stepped across to the nearest grapple, climbed up onto it, and sat down with his legs on either side of the massive cable. Should the attack ship fire at him now, it stood a good chance of destroying its own cable—a fact which might make it hesitate for long enough. Cormac aimed at the other cable, with the APW setting at its highest, and pulled the trigger. The beam transformed his target into a white-hot bar, then it just dissolved in violet fire. Ogygian tilted underneath him as he brought the weapon to bear on the cable right next to him, then suddenly he was weightless and instinctively clinging on. The second grapple had torn away, holding wreckage like a fistful of hair grasped from someone narrowly escaped. Ogygian dropped away down an invisible lift shaft to hell. Above, the cable slackened in a long arc through space, then began to straighten out again. Cormac clung on for all he was worth. When the cable tautened, about ten gees compacted his spine down onto the grapple. The APW became too heavy to hold and tore from his grasp. He felt his vertebrae cracking and things ripping inside him, but still he clung on. Thoughts he had briefly entertained of taking action against the ship should the cable be reeled in, died then.

When the acceleration finally ceased, he coughed, spattering his visor with blood. But when he looked down he was satisfied to see no sign of the Ogygian. The cable did then reel him in until he was only twenty metres from the lethal ship’s left-hand weapons nacelle. Ports were opening before him, annihilation a breath away.

‘Now that has really pissed me off,’ the King of Hearts’ AI informed him.

Consciousness crept up on him and inserted itself into his perception. Coming out of black nothingness, Anderson slowly realized he was awake. He was lying in the lee of a slab, which was a conglomerate of fossilized worms and bivalve shells the shape of kidneys. He reached up to ensure his skull was in one piece, found a wadded blanket supporting his head. Warily he rolled to one side, wincing as his body informed him of its injuries, and sat upright to look around.

Bonehead was a dome nearby—everything utterly retracted. Looking at the hog’s damaged shell where the saddle and lance framework had been torn away, Anderson thought he would need to make a lot of repairs with epoxy—and should not ride the hog for some time, until the shell had healed internally. Now he turned his attention to where the others stood beside what it took him a moment to identify as the fallen droon, his lance still impaling it. He stood up a little unsteadily and walked over, noting that the brass man was gone.

‘You’re recovered.’ Tergal spotted him first.

Anderson wondered about the tone of resentment he sensed, and recognized that Tergal had not found these latest adventures to his liking.

‘As best as can be expected,’ Anderson replied.

Arden and Thorn now turned towards him, too. He gazed past them to where the vulture perched on the wide deflated head of the droon. During his reading, in the library of Rondure, he had never come across the word ‘vulture’, but he recognized this creature as an uglier version of some pictures he had seen of things called ‘birds’.

‘The conquering hero returns,’ said the vulture.

Anderson did recollect reading how some birds were good mimics, but that did not sound like mimicry to him. In fact it sounded very like Unger Salbec. He winced at this reminder—another complication to add to the What now? malaise he seemed to be suffering.

‘Tergal told me your trial has lasted twenty years.’ Arden studied him with some amusement. ‘And you also told me our friend here would be dragon enough.’ She pushed a foot against one sprawled-out limb, which looked like a twisted and torn I-beam projecting from the wreckage of some collapsed building. Anderson stepped back a pace, remembering one particular third-stage sleer in a hailstorm.

‘It’s enough,’ said Anderson.

‘So you’ll return to Rondure?’ she asked.

Anderson shrugged. If he returned anywhere, it would be to Bravence, where Unger Salbec awaited him. But he was not the kind of person who returned anywhere. He glanced at Tergal. ‘What do you think?’

Tergal shook his head. ‘I have debts to repay, if you’ll allow me.’

Anderson nodded, turned to Thorn. ‘What about you?’

‘That remains to be decided,’ said Thorn. He studied the weapon he held, pulled out the empty clip and stared inside it almost accusingly, before slapping it back into place. He then pointed over Anderson’s shoulder.

They all turned to watch the blimp approach.

In utter frustration, Skellor withdrew from Cento. It was like the Occam Razor—that AI burn. But he had encountered no other Golem possessing the ability to destroy its own mind. He supposed Cento had prepared himself for this—having assessed the dangers Jain tech represented to one of his kind. Skellor pushed the Golem away. No matter—he really, really had more important concerns.

The brown dwarf’s tidal swathe was hitting with metronomic regularity, splitting and tearing apart Ogygian all around him. Bound together by internally generated diamond fibres and with what remained of his human nervous system shut down, Skellor tried to bend with the flow, distorted, the fibres snapping inside him, other structures breaking. But he rebuilt them, bound himself together with more fibres, and concentrated all his resources on constructing inside his torso the gravitic generator that would power him to survival.

The agent probably thought he had won—thought that this was the end of Skellor. But Skellor was more than mere human: he could survive this, would survive this.

The temperature was rising. Already some materials inside the ship were beginning to vaporize. The continuous grinding, twisting and flexing of the ship’s structure and the rippling of its hull were generating most of the heat. Bubble-metal I-beams, taking on a cherry glow, stretched like toffee and twisted apart, the inert gases used to foam their metal bleeding away into vacuum. Behind Skellor, the hull separated like wet cardboard, and underneath him the floor bowed alarmingly, then began to slew away. Everything, bar himself and one other item, was coming apart as if utterly rotten. That the Golem chassis retained its shape was testament to Polity materials technology. But even that would not survive the impact to come.

The next gravity wave hit hard and lasted longer, shattering what remained of the ship across a kilometre of space. Pieces of it were now incandescent—boiling into vacuum. Skellor retained his own shape — reinforced it from inside using structural force fields powered by his internal gravitic generator. But something was wrong. That wave had nearly ripped him in two, yet with the theorized output of the generator, it should not have. And he would need everything the generator could give him, as there was much worse to come. He ran a diagnostic on the machine, but found it was functioning at optimum. Separate from his internal diagnostics, he probed inside it with nanoptic fibres, and located the node growing right in the centre of it. He opened the generator, forced the node out, closed the generator and had it up to forty per cent of function when the next wave hit.

Skellor screamed, mostly in rage and frustration — now a piece of diamond-sewn meat stretched out over four metres of nothing. Tidal forces had shredded the remains of the ship, the bulk of it now a falling arc of metallic vapour. Skellor was the largest single chunk remaining, the second-largest being an eyeless Golem skull. He slowly drew himself back together, high above an endless brown plain; became a black human doll full of whorls and knots. Witch-fingered. Much of his substance had been torn away or had boiled into vacuum, and his mind was losing cohesion. Before it went completely, simple physics impinged: he could not survive this; how had he ever thought he could survive this?

Some hours later a fibrous mass containing Jain eggs, which so far had managed to retain their shape, hit the surface. Half that mass turned to energy. All that remained was a baroque silver pattern across the dun surface.

Through tunnelling vision Cormac watched as out of an elliptical port on the side of the nacelle, at the end of a jointed arm, extruded a close-quarters laser. This device looked something like a premillennial machine-gun, though rather than belt-fed with ammunition, it was fed by thick, ribbed power cables. But it served the same purpose, normally being used against smaller opponents who had actually managed to get close to the ship’s hull. It was precisely the weapon required to remove Cormac from the grapple, probably in pieces. He spat blood and looked aside, still seeing into the tear in his perception. Perhaps he could step inside the ship, cause damage… something? No, the whole idea was laughable now. He had done it; he had shifted himself through U-space by an act of will, but right then he had no idea of how he had done it. And what could he do inside the ship, injured and weak as he was? Reality was himself suspended in vacuum with a laser pointed at him and death imminent. Then, through that same tear in vision, something surfaced distantly, something huge.

‘I see,’ said King.

The laser powered up, a hot glow emitting from its sooty workings. It turned on its arm and fired. The cable glowed red, white, blue-white, then the centre of that light exploded into globules of molten carbon. Once again Cormac was weightless as the grapple and a short piece of the cable he was clinging to began to fall back towards the brown dwarf. The laser folded away, all ports closed, and the attack ship receded above him.

‘You saw that I did not gain access to Skellor—or to Jain technology,’ King sent.

‘So,’ Cormac managed.

‘Tell Jerusalem that.’

As he fell, Cormac faded; even the perceptile programs he had been using were not managing to keep him conscious. He saw a vision of curving steel, thought himself near impact with the dwarf star, but realized that was wrong. If he was that close, he would not see a curve to the horizon—would probably see nothing at all.

Then something titanic engulfed him, and claws, three-fingered and gleaming, closed on his upper arms. As they separated him from the cable, things ripped inside his body. Blood exploded from his mouth, and something hard entered his neck. After a numb hiatus, which he read in his gridlink as having lasted seven minutes, came bright aseptic light.

‘This may take some time,’ said the voice of Asselis Mika. ‘I don’t think there’s an unbroken bone in his body.’

Another voice, the resonant iceberg tip of vast intellect, noted, ‘The inside of his head is not much better.’

The lights went out again.

When humans referred to something called a ‘cold sweat’, Dragon had formerly known what it meant only on an intellectual level. Now the entity understood what it meant on a visceral level. In its dealings with the Polity, it had always purposely encountered lesser entities than itself. This was why it had always kept away from the larger-capacity runcible AIs—sector AIs—and tried not to operate within twenty light-years of any place in which Earth Central had shown the slightest interest. Jerusalem was precisely the kind of Polity AI that Dragon had therefore always avoided. Now the entity was reminded why, for Jerusalem possessed the sheer mental power to beat Dragon at its own games whilst also inhabiting a ship body possessing the physical size and power to render it unnecessary for it to play such games.

This was why Dragon had found itself unable to conceal certain facts for very long. The essence of the transmission, after the initial fencing, had been: ‘Tell me everything, and fast’—along with the blueprint of one of the Jerusalem’s internal chambers and an overview of the equipment that could be used there. Dragon was left in no doubt that the ship could encompass, immobilize, then dismantle it to see how it ticked.

That the Jerusalem had dropped into U-space upon learning about the Ogygian was less than reassuring. It meant the AI certainly knew that Dragon would not be escaping and could be dealt with at leisure. The thought of such an AI gaining access to Skellor was frightening. The thought of it obtaining certain items that Skellor would soon be shedding, like a dandelion scattering its seeds in the breeze, was enough to give even a dragon nightmares. But Dragon had no power to affect those events, though one such item, close by, it had aimed to put in safer hands.

Still on course for Cull, the entity linked through to the flying lizard, which had coiled up to sleep in a sulerbane leaf, the recent stress of expected extinction having obviously exhausted it. Receiving instruction, the creature reared up, shook itself and flew over to the carapace remains of Skellor’s last meal on Cull, landed and looked to where the golden egg had fallen. Dragon was so amused it decided to let the lizard live despite its near contact with Jain technology. Where the egg had lain in the dust, now rested a blue acorn.

Dragon wondered what the brass man would make of his new toy.

Others might wonder at the entity’s definition of ‘safer hands’.